Sumitomo Heavy Industries (SHI) and NEC Corporation (NEC) have announced plans to jointly develop a system that automatically detects and reports near misses at construction sites.
The collaboration will begin in April 2026 and aims to improve safety by analyzing camera footage and sensor data collected from hydraulic excavators.
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The planned system will employ an extracted AI model that analyzes video footage along with operating data from SHI’s excavators.
According to SHI, this AI model learns from hydraulic excavator data stored on the SHI Group’s ICT/IoT platform “SHICuTe” and identifies dangerous scenes from recorded video.
NEC’s proprietary technology analyzes these risk scenes, integrates video recognition and generative AI, and stores the information as multimodal data with temporal and spatial details.
By referencing this analytical data and SHI’s knowledge of machine operations and human workflow, the system cross-checks for dangerous or prohibited actions defined by past accidents, equipment failures, and specific operational requirements.
This process also incorporates company-specific data. Using these inputs, the system automatically flags high-risk situations that require reporting and generates near-miss reports with a concise summary of each incident.
Prior to this effort, a technical proof of concept was conducted in September 2025. At this stage, the team used video footage captured by the excavator’s camera to test whether the system could identify and report near-miss incidents.
As a result, we found that we can report cases that include potential accident scenarios and their associated circumstances.
In fiscal 2026, SHI and NEC plan to continue technological development and verification using SHI’s field data and safety management know-how and the AI technology provided by NEC.
The aim is to put it into practical use in 2027.
Plans include expanding the system’s application beyond worker-machine contact situations.
This enhancement is intended to address hazardous situations that are not immediately obvious to workers and to account for site-specific operating rules.
SHI and NEC will continue to leverage their respective strengths to develop and verify new technologies and contribute to the realization of safer construction sites.
